Union, Denver Transit Make Tentative Deal

Published 7:00 pm, Tuesday, April 1, 2003

Associated Press Writer

A transit strike was averted Wednesday when negotiators reached a tentative agreement on a contract for 1,900 drivers, light rail operators and mechanics.

The agreement, which still must be ratified by union members, was reached about four hours after the midnight Tuesday strike deadline, said Dave Minshall, spokesman for Local 1001 of the Amalgamated Transit Union.

A union vote likely will be held within 10 days, Minshall said. The agreement also must be approved by the RTD board.

A strike could have shut down two-thirds of the RTD's bus routes and all of its rail routes, affecting thousands of commuters.

"If you had 250,000 riders in their cars today, it would have been a mess," said software writer Greg Bloom, while waiting for a bus from Broomfield to the Denver Tech Center. "I don't know the details of the agreement, but from where I see it, it's great."

The tentative three-year deal does not cost RTD any more than the one overwhelming rejected by workers March 16, Reed said.

The union accepted RTD's proposals to freeze wages each year and pay less toward health care premiums. Additionally, workers would be eligible for overtime pay only after working 40 hours in a week, instead of eight hours in a day.

In exchange, RTD agreed to let union members keep two paid holidays it had wanted to eliminate _ their birthday and anniversary. The district also agreed to retain precedents on how disciplinary and grievance cases were handled instead of rewriting the policies, union lawyer Bill Jones said.

The transit agency serves seven Denver-area counties and logs 250,000 passenger trips every weekday, including about 35,000 on trains.

The old contract expired Feb. 28. Negotiations had made little progress since then, but Mayor Wellington Webb pleaded with both sides to keep talking.

The average full-time bus driver was paid $42,300 annually, and got three weeks' paid vacation and 12 paid holidays under the old contract.